Planet of Slums

The megacities arising around the planet are like the Internet where many events are taking place simultaneously. The urban scape today is becoming more a space of flows—migrants, trade, capital, information, microbes—than a space of places rooted in an historical identity. The megaurban condition today encompasses many realities, from the glittering generic city‐state of Singapore to the slums climbing up the hillsides around Mexico City or Sao Paulo. In these spaces we work, love and live out the intimate moments of our lives. In these spaces we consume and spew out climate warming gases. In this section, two of the world's “star architects”—Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry—the visionary “arcologist” Paolo Soleri and the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, grasp at chronicling the reality of where we live.     

Justice Without Borders: Human Rights Cases in U.S. Courts

In 1980 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals broke with years of legal tradition and ruled that human rights victims could sue their oppressors in federal court—even if the alleged violations occurred outside the country. This court based the extension of its authority on a provision of the 1789 Judiciary Act now referred to as the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA). ATCA cases present a unique opportunity to study judicial behavior in the face of separation of powers interests, traditions of judicial restraint, sovereign immunity defenses, and an active internationalist movement to extend human rights guarantees worldwide. Combining legal analysis with quantitative methodology, I find that U.S. federal courts are slowly accepting an internationalist approach to human rights, and that interest groups are largely driving this transformation. Sovereignty concerns and judicial ideology are not conditioning case outcomes, but party resources and separation of powers issues are.     

The design and implementation of Family Foster Care Services for high risk delinquents Transitioning from Correctional Confinement

Specialized Family Care (SFC) provides planned, long term family foster care to youth who have been adjudicated as delinquent and who are at high risk of on-going delinquent behavior following their transition into the community from correctional confinement. The program is funded and operated through a collaborative arrangement among The Casey Family Program-Bismarck Division, the North Dakota Department of Human Services (DHS) and the North Dakota Division of Juvenile Services (DJS). Specially recruited, trained and supported foster families work closely with a dual case management system of services provided by SFC social workers and DJS case managers responsible for community-based aftercare. Individual case plans for youth involve a mix of intensive aftercare programming for delinquent behaviors, individually designed intervention strategies, intensive supervision, and intensive casework. This article discusses the program model, implementation challenges, costs and preliminary outcomes.     

FIFA/IOC‐Sanctioned Development and the Imminence of Erotic Space

Based on ethnographic research conducted since April 2014, this paper will examine the intersection between mega‐event security apparatuses, event‐led urbanism, and local geographies of desire. We argue that urban sanitisation strategies (particularly those derived from a constellation of foreign interests) threaten local geographies of desire but remain dependent upon erotic space and subjectivities in (trans)national exchange and everyday economic salvation. The erasure of sexual diversity is a case with which to examine the impact of FIFA/IOC‐sanctioned urban renewal, and the manner in which local bodies (particularly those deemed sexually ‘deviant’) are repeatedly forced to circumvent these globally determined processes of development.     

Regulation of Technology Transfer to Developing Countries: The Relevance of Institutional Capacity*

This article revisits the debate over appropriate approaches to the regulation of technology transfer to developing countries. It begins by contrasting two stylized approaches, labeled for convenience the “New International Economic Order” model and the “Globalization” model, which have historically struggled for acceptance. It then explores the implications for the choice between these or alternative models of the fact that many developing countries presently lack the institutional capacity required to provide optimal regulation of technology transfer. Existing discussions appear either to assume that developing countries possess sufficient institutional capacity to design and implement sophisticated regulatory regimes, or to take the opposite approach and assume a drastic shortage of institutional capacity. Both approaches ignore the intermediate category of countries that do face constraints upon institutional capacity but are striving to overcome them. The analysis here is intended to demonstrate the general point that a country's present and future institutional capacity ought to be considered highly relevant to the design of central aspects of the regime that it uses to regulate technology transfer. The analysis is also designed to highlight the specific need for attention to the distinctive questions of regulatory design which arise in countries that are in the process of enhancing their institutional capacity in this and other regulatory contexts.